


Bloom

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Florists, M/M, Short One Shot, mmygar - discussed, who is Nny jealous of? you decide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:31:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13903116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Nny kills a florist, makes a friend, and tries to recall color theory. First impressions make all the difference





	Bloom

**Author's Note:**

> again, a fill from the kink meme that I'm bringing over into this archive

Nny scrubs at his face so hard that days worth of grime comes off along with the blood of the florist, which would be a bonus except that the layer of grime is also all that is protecting his face from touching the miasma of the world. He squints at himself in the mirror. Should he finish scrubbing off the rest of his exposed skin while he’s here, so that it at least matches? He thinks about just smashing the mirror instead, to solve his dilemma, but before he can commit to the idea the doorbell rings.

Nny turns, towel in hand, and looks through the door of the employees-only section and into the flower shop. There are cultures where you can inherit a crown by killing a king, he thinks. If he’s killed the florist, does that make him the florist? And furthermore, if it doesn’t, who’s going to sell these flowers?

Nny tosses the towel into the sink and finishes tying the apron around his waist–-he’d pulled it on before the evisceration to avoid staining his favorite shirt, he might as well commit to it. In the main room of the shop, there’s a young man of the black-nail-polish set with his hand hovering above the service bell, frozen in the moment before a particularly obnoxious smash. Nny looks him over. No one man should wear that much fishnet.

The young man looks at Nny. He sheepishly withdraws his hand and hides it in the pocket of his ratty jeans, more patch and safety-pin than actual fabric. “Uh,” he says. “Hey. Could you maybe help me with something?”

“Possibly,” Nny says, as he makes his way over to the counter. He doesn’t know a whole lot about flowers, but he’s got a lot of color theory knocking around in the back of his head from somewhere, and he figures it can’t be all that difficult. He spreads his hands over the display case and leans in.

The young man does a really obvious double take at Nny, gaze tracking up from his hands to his body to his face, at which point Nny is already resigning himself to murdering his first customer, what a shame, it’s no way to run a business, and then the man says–

“I like your hair.”

Nny tilts his head. “If you’re being facetious,” he says, “it will do you no good to apologize now.”

“No?” the man says. He frowns, kind of confused. “I mean I like it. It’s interesting. You’re interesting.”

“Oh,” Nny says, pleasantly stumped. He can’t remember the last time someone had something nice to say about him.

“I’m kind of a connoisseur of interesting people,” the young man goes on, folding his arms over the display case. It brings their faces quite close together. “I’m Jimmy, by the way.”

“Johnny,” Johnny says. And then, “Nny, if you like.”

“Nny,” Jimmy repeats, like he’s tasting the way it sounds. “I like it! It’s different. How long have you been working here, Nny?”

He thinks about it for a second. “Today’s my first day,” he says.

Jimmy grins at him. “Lucky thing for me, huh?”

Nny, pleasantly nonplussed, smiles back. He’s kind of rusty at this. The last time he was in a situation like this, he was on the other side of the counter. But the bookstore was a while back, and he hasn’t seen Devi since…

“I’ve got this person I’m trying to impress,” Jimmy says, one black nail tracing circles on the glass case top, “he–-uh, they–-well it’s a guy. First off.”

Jimmy looks at him like he’s waiting for the bomb to go off, lips pressed tight, and Nny thinks that he probably hasn’t had very many conversations end well in his life. It’s a feeling Nny can relate to. “You won’t hear any recrimination from this direction,” he says.

The grin comes back in full force. The man’s teeth are pretty fucked up, but Nny isn’t one to judge. It’s just nice to see someone smile for once.

“So this guy,” Jimmy says, “he’s like… he’s real smart. Real sophisticated. Probably out of my league by miles but I’m gonna give it a shot anyhow, cause about all I’ve got going for me is I’m too dumb to know when to quit. He works in an office. I was thinking something he could put on his desk, like they do in romcoms? You know what I mean?”

Nny mostly watches cartoons and infomercials, but he’s got a vague idea what Jimmy means. He starts rummaging around in the cases for the kind of vase he’s imagining, something glass with a kind of twisty curvy pattern.

Jimmy’s got his cheek in his hand, this goofy look on his face. “I met him when I was breaking into his neighbor’s apartment-–I mean I was _trying_ to, actually I broke into his, but that’s fate I guess! Sweet serendipity! You shoulda seen his face when I opened the door, it was so funny–”

The monologue fades to a kind of buzz in Nny’s ear as he flicks through the flowers in the case. They can’t all be big ones, can they? No, there have to be some small ones too. He starts pulling roses from the case-–not the red ones, red is just blood and viscera and the inescapable feeling that you have forgotten something vital. He pulls the orange ones, the ones the change color at the edges. Those are a good color for something hopeful and bright, the start of something new.

“–The down side is that he thinks I’m his neighbor now, but it the good things about that is that it’s really easy to just knock on the door all casual like and not give away the fact that I actually took two buses to get there. I wanna marry him. Okay, like, I know I can’t _actually_ marry him, but I still wanna. I wanna climb in the dirt with him and just, you know, rot for a hundred years together.”

“That does sound nice,” Nny says, absently.

“You ever just see somebody,” Jimmy says, “and it changes your whole life? You thought you were nobody before, and all of a sudden you’re somebody? And you know you can’t ever go back to being who you were?”

Nny pauses in his work. A terrible longing goes through him, it scours him like hot sand, touching every weak soft corner of his weak soft body. He can almost imagine the feeling Jimmy describes, the feeling of the spotlight coming on in the darkness. What he wouldn’t give to feel that, to feel anything that wasn’t the all-consuming misery he lives in, the hateful loathing that chews on him at night like a fleet of bedbugs.

Jimmy, with all his flared up magma-cracking acne and crooked teeth, almost glows with it. It lights him up from the inside, making him beautiful. Nny has to look away from it.

“The thing is–” Jimmy’s voice goes sideways somehow, like he’s dripping into a corner, slinking away, “I don’t actually–-well, I don’t have a lot of money. I mean I don’t have any money. But this is really important! This is true love, you know? This is the shit that matters, the fate of souls, man. Not money.”

Baby’s breath. That’s a good filler. Soft and white, something just born and still untouched by the sweaty fist of the world. Every child eventually becomes an adult, but there at the beginning you can still hope… you can still hope…

“But I’ve washed dishes in restaurants before,” Jimmy says, pulling himself back together, “when the bill came short and all. I thought maybe I could do something like that for you? Maybe there’s something you need done in the back? I may not have finished high school but I can lift a box as good as anybody.”

Nny considers this. It makes as much sense as anything else. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what the previous florist might have left undone at the time of his necessary demise. Nny rests a hip against the counter, thoughtful. Well, there is one task he always wishes he could delegate.

“Could you move a body for me?”

Jimmy opens his mouth, and then he closes it. “Like,” he says, “a dead body?”

“Gosh I hope so,” Nny says, “I did take all his blood out of him first. It would be unsettling if he got up now.”

Jimmy blinks at him. “Wow,” he says, “you run a hard core fucking flower shop, Nny.”

“He’s in the back room,” Nny says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “If you could just get him into the nearest dumpster, I’d consider that payment rendered. Don’t knock over the blood. Unfortunately, I need it.”

Jimmy is giving him a look that he can’t quite decipher and doesn’t particularly care to, something with big eyes and a slightly open mouth, but the important thing is that after a moment he goes.

Nny can hear him knocking around in the back for a few minutes after that, but then he starts sorting through the mid-sized flowers for something that will look right in the arrangement and forgets about most everything else. Maybe he _should_ do this for a while. Make a day job of it. It’s very soothing.

As the arrangement starts to come together, Nny thinks more and more about this person that Jimmy is so infatuated with-–this creature who has inspired such devotion in another human being. Perhaps Jimmy is simply someone who gives his heart easily. But even so, the power of giving another person your heart, trusting that they will hold it gently… What kind of person, he wonders, could be worthy of such a thing?

And the more he thinks about it, the more disgruntled he becomes. Perhaps Jimmy will take his turn slowly decomposing in the earth with his beloved beside him, and then where will Nny be? Still alone in his wretched home, with his restless walls, slurping up the waste of the world like some kind of fat little sucker fish? If there is beauty out there-–if purity survives, if goodness lives-–then where has it been when Nny looked for it?

Jimmy comes back in, toeing the door closed and smacking his hands clean in front of him. He looks fresh, despite the new dark stain over his stomach. He looks _happy_ , effortlessly so, with his heart on his fishnet sleeve.

“Piece of cake,” he says, and helps himself to the previous florist’s lukewarm coffee. 

Yes. Happiness. Nny looks down into the flowers he has gathered and he sees the shadow play shape of happiness, a dream thrown on Plato’s cavern. Beautiful. Ephemeral.

“I’m real grateful for the help,” Jimmy tells him, screwing up his face at the coffee before dropping it in the trash. “Normally I’d just lift some cash from the donation plate down at the First Methodist but Edgar, he won’t even touch gifts if he gets a whiff of stolen money off them. Sucks too ‘cause I got him some real nice gloves off the shoplift shelf outside the Ross-–heheh, I call it that ‘cause it’s outside, where the employees can’t see you, right? Hey, is that finished already?”

Nny closes a saffron blossom between his fingers, feeling the soft crunch of petals breaking from stamen. “Edgar, you said?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, like just the sound of the name turns on the light in his stomach. “Edgar Vargas. He works down at the DMV, maybe you’ve seen him around?”

Petals trickle out of Nny’s fist, yellow on black leather, not yet browned from their inevitable bruising.

“No,” he says, “but maybe I should meet him.”


End file.
